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User blog:Robert Hester/Initial notes for KOC users especially
I am getting more skeptical about Empires and Allies because it seems to me that combat and offensive strategy is not at the same level of ferocity as was in KOC (edit- Kabaam game Kingdoms of Camelot). That said, here are some observations I have made about techniques for playing the game. * In combat, there is no need to click fast like in a first person shooter game. This is clearly documented in the help, but I was too thick to figure it out. It is a turn based thing- you can take ten or 30 minutes to shoot and his units won't take their shot until you make yours. Your next shot is the same. Secondly, if you have a treasured unit that looks like its hit points are almost gone, you can top them up for about 30 cents. * It is important to get on the staff of government buildings in your friends kingdoms. These pay a minimum of 300 coins every day, and the bigger ones are like 1200 coins. The urge is to nominate everyone for your staff so you can quickly progress on building up your population, but these staff cannot be dismissed so you cannot later give positions to people who are helping you in the game. You need to accept staff positions given to you as soon as possible, or others will take them. To check for such offers, look in the upper right corner of for the little Z and a number next to it. Click it for the offers sent to you. IF it is zero, you have no new offers/requests. ** Edit: I haven't tried this yet, but if you dismiss the neighbor in the staff position, the position might free up. The neighbor could then be re-added after you friend had taken the staff position. * Unlike KOC, research on units is a bad investment. The reason why is that by the time you have the units upgraded, you have much better units available. That is, by the time have scraped up and invested the 18K coins and time necessary to fully upgrade a "vintage" (USS Langley) class carrier, you can build a light carrier (USS Yorktown). Which would you rather have? An upgraded Langley, or Yorktown. But then again, why bother building any Yorktowns, or heavy carriers and leapfrog to a 21st century Super Carrier? I think I won't build any units until I can build maximum units or there is a situation where I really really have to. I know that many of the goals it gives you requires particular units, but personally, the goals seem like rat maze enticements to fritter away your time units on low payoff enterprises. *Amazing fact: you can buy units from other players using coins (not real money). So you could be a level 12 kingdom with weapons that only a level 30 kingdom can build. This is totally legit- the way it happens is that you can go to the market of high might player and many of them have formidable weapons for sale. This means there is no reason to build any arms that will become obsolete. Just build up your population so that you can build the most dangerous weapons yourself. Until then, save up and buy B-52s, F-35s and Rail gun battleships etc. from a high might arms supplier. Note: these are very expensive- a B-52 costs 8500 I think. Edit- I was mistaken about the previous. A player is prevented from purchasing items they have not yet unlocked. It is possible to buy the A-10 Warthog that has 100 hit points that is part of a starter package randomly offered for $14. Without the warthog it would be a decent deal, but with it, it gives you the money you need to buy liberty bonds for expansion (I never acquire them fast enough but don't wait because they are only 20 cents or so to buy). *Offensive operations: If you do not have your embassy turned on, you will be invaded. This will cause no damage/ deplete none of your units. While they occupy your land, accessing those quadrants will cost more movement units. (If you are familiar with frontierville, this is the same thing as when a bear, snake or other varmint is active). Check out invading someone else's kingdom and you will quickly see that clusters of government buildings are the thing to go for. If you win the invasion you get money at the expense of time units used in the battle, and any battle units you may lose. If you can occupy for 4 hours, you get the same payout. You will not retain your occupation very long unless your units are more powerful than anything their friends have. *Inactives. It is key to get lots and lots of friends early on. Some of them will eventually lose interest and become inactives like in KOC. These will become your farms where you will maintain permanent occupations. * My current strategy Keep the embassy (immunity) on all the time. I ignore the missions, ignore building battle units, ignore research, ignore fighting any battles and just build farms, houses and expansions so that I have an overwhelming money machine I can use to buy whatever units I want from high might players. To do this, I have to have some support infrastructure. I need high capacity sawmills to produce the wood required for building farms (the cost of a farm is like 15 wood at the beginning, but increases. I am at something like 135 wood per farm now. Eventually you will find Sawmill II's more convenient, so you may want to devote some time towards building up your population so that these buildings will be unlocked. *Staggering farms. Note that if you have a lot of farms, you will not have enough time units to harvest them all. The solution is to "stagger" their harvest times so that at any point in time, you have only a portion of them becoming ready for harvest so that you have enough time units to harvest all, but also enough time to use the money to build more farms and houses. *Don't build high capacity houses. Unless you have a real good supply of ore, you will not be able to build enough high capacity houses because of the "foreign" ore required. Small cottages do not require ore, so I build only those. (As of the time of this writing, "French cottages" are available for a limited time and have slightly better costs vs resources required.) Note that at level 29, the brick house is available which requires only local ore- meaning whatever you dig up can be used and you don't have to wander around to everyone's markets to find what you need. The reason why you'd want to nuke old cottages in favor of the brick houses is that I often do not collect taxes on the low capacity houses because I'd rather have the energy for something else. *Market tip: If you are searching the markets, rather than go one my one, click the "Neighbors tab". This gives you an indication of who is selling and what. Category:Blog posts